A distribution of impact factors of journals in the area of software: An empirical study

Data from two bibliographic databases i.e. COMPENDEX and INSPEC have been collected on the broad subject software and related topics. The titles of the journals were extracted from the database. The impact factors of the titles were also collected in order to study the distribution of impact factors. An attempt has been made to identify a suitable model to describe a distribution of impact factors. It has been observed that a Gamma distribution fits the observed data very well with one of the parameters as mean of the distribution and other parameter as 1. Further it has been observed that the researchers are now publishing their articles in high impact factor journals.